From Conference to Industry Association with Bri Norton, Ricky Onsman, and Amanda Mace

>> PAOLA GONZALEZ: Welcome, everyone, to WordPress Accessibility Meetup: From Conference to Industry Association with Bri Norton, Ricky Onsman, and Amanda Mace. I have a few announcements today. If you want to stay updated with everything that’s going on in WordPress Accessibility, if you ever have a question, or you are very knowledgeable in what is accessibility, you should be able to join our Facebook Group. That is the best place to connect between meetups. You can find us at facebook.com/groups/wordpress.accessibility. You can also find upcoming events and past recordings in one place. Yes, this meetup is being recorded. It’s going to be up in about two weeks’ time, because it takes us a while to get it corrected to transcript. You can always find all of our meetups at equalizedigital.com/meetup. You can also join our email list to get news and event announcements. We send an email every Thursday with a recap of news around web accessibility. We do send reminders for all of our meetup events. You can join our email list at equalizedigital.com/focus-state.

You can also tune in to the audio version of the meetups. We do post them on our podcast. You can find them at accessibilitycraft.com. We are seeking for additional sponsors for a meetup to cover the cost for ASL interpretation or for upcoming meetups with live captioning. Also, if you have any suggestions for the meetup or need any additional accommodations to make the meetup work for you, you can always contact us at meetup@equalizedigital.com. That goes to both me and Amber. Amber is usually here doing the announcements. Today, it’s me, but the email does go to both of us, and we will get a reply for you.

Who are we? We are the organizers of Meetup, Equalize Digital. We are a mission-driven organization focused on WordPress accessibility. Our WordPress plugin, Accessibility Checker, scans for accessibility problems and provides reports on the post edit screen to make building accessible websites easier. You can find us at equalizedigital.com and on most social medias. We would like to thank our live captioning sponsor for tonight. It’s GoDaddy. GoDaddy’s vision is to empower a worldwide community of entrepreneurs by giving them all the help and tools they need to grow online, including a simpler, safer WordPress experience.

GoDaddy provides a managed WordPress experience that is as easy as it is effective. The latest version of WordPress comes pre-installed with exclusive themes, plugins, and tools to get you up and running quickly with automated backups, updates, and malware removal so our pros can spend less time on monotonous maintenance and more time building their businesses. You can find them at godaddy.com. We always encourage our attendees to message them, to just post, maybe a tweet or a Facebook message, letting them know, just thanking them for sponsoring Meetup, so that they know that we did our job and announced them during Meetup.

I want to announce some of our upcoming events. Our next meetup is going to be on Elementor Accessibility. That is going to be with Angela Bowman and David Danedo. That’s going to be on Thursday, July 10th at 10:00 AM Central. This meetup is usually on the first Thursday of the month, but because of July 4th, the American holiday, we moved it to July 10th. Also, next month, our WordPress Accessibility Meetup, that is in this one-time slot that’s supposed to be on Monday, July 21st, it is canceled, but we do have all of our meetups coming up in the regular schedule after that.

We have Hiring for Inclusion: Building an Accessibility-Centric Workforce. That’s going to be on Thursday, August 7th at 10:00 AM Central. Without further ado, I would like to introduce today’s panelists. I’m just going to put a spotlight on them. Today we have Bri Norton from Digital Accessibility Consultant at Accessibility Works. We have Ricky Onsman, who has presented here before, Principal Technical Writer for the Knowledge Center at TPGi, and Amanda Mace, Vice President at GrackleDocs. I’m just going to stop sharing and give you guys a spotlight so you can finish with your own introductions and get started on your presentation. Welcome to the floor, everyone.

>> BRI NORTON: Thanks, Paola. Over to you, Amanda.

>> AMANDA MACE: Perfect.

>> BRI NORTON: I’m sharing my screen.

>> AMANDA MACE: Thank you. I’m going to start with an acknowledgment of country. We’d like to acknowledge the Wadjuk people who are the traditional custodians of the land on which I am joining this meeting from and pay respect to the elders of the Wadjuk Nation, both past and present. We extend this respect to all Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people in attendance today. I welcome you to put which country you are joining this meeting from, to acknowledge their elders, past and present.

We’ll move on to some quick introductions for all of us today. My name is Amanda Mace. I am indeed Vice President for GrackleDocs Australasia, so I look after the GrackleDocs regional office for Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. It’s quite a big remit. I’m also a digital accessibility expert and have been in the industry. I am now sitting in my 13th year in this industry, believe it or not. In fact, this introduction on the screen is a little bit dated. I’m actually now the only W3C regional manager for a W3C chapter office and the only W3C evangelist in Australia currently.

I co-chair alongside Bri, who will do a little introduction of herself, for OZeWAI, the Australian Web Accessibility Initiative, here in Australia. Bri, from there, why don’t I hand over to you?

>> BRI NORTON: Yes. Bri Norton. This is also dated for me because I’m actually working part-time with an organization called Ability Works. I’m mentoring a small team of people in digital accessibility, and we are slowly trying to update our website, which is also in WordPress. It’s a customised WordPress site. Being part of the accessibility WordPress community is very important for me. I’m also on the Australian Accessible ICT Standards Committee, and I’m a ResearchOps Cheese Board Member. I try and get involved in quite a few things, from user research and bringing in accessibility earlier in the process, right up to the digital accessibility understanding of WCAG. All right. Over to you, Ricky.

>> RICKY ONSMAN: Hello. My name is Ricky Onsman. As you’ve seen, I’m the Principal Technical Writer at TPGi, which is a US-based global digital accessibility consultancy, where what I do is I write rules and guidance for our internal engineers and our clients on how to conform with WCAG and how to comply with all the other accessibility standards that are out there around the world. The reason I’m here is that I’ve been a long-term attendee of OZeWAI, the conference. I think I went to my first one in 2010. I joined the committee in 2014. Ever since then, we’ve been looking at what we should do as an organization to further the aims and objectives of the digital accessibility industry in Australia.

That’s taken a lot of discussion over a lot of time. Some of the things that have changed over time have been due to external circumstances like COVID, but it’s also been due to us internally trying to find a new path on how we do what we do. Just to explain, as Amanda said, OZeWAI stands for the Australian Web Accessibility Initiative. When I first started attending OZeWAI conferences, it was actually the Australian Web Adaptability Initiative, which has a slightly different connotation. We changed the name to bring it more into line with the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative, so we consider ourselves in some ways the Australian arm of W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative.

The conference, from the time that I started attending it, was very much a gathering of all people who were interested in digital accessibility in Australia. Its huge advantage, as all conferences do, was that it drew people from across the country to all gather together once a year to listen to presentations and talks from people in Australia and people we brought in from overseas on how to increase awareness and implementation of digital accessibility in Australia.

In that time, we achieved a lot of things that I don’t think anybody could have achieved otherwise. It’s important to note that one of the big factors for us is just simply the size of the country that we’re in. The three people you have on the screen here today we’re spread across a very large country. I don’t know how many thousands of miles away Amanda is from me. She’s on the West Coast, I’m on the East Coast, but it’s a lot. It’s something like a four or five-hour flight from Perth to Sydney. That makes asking people to attend a single conference every year quite a tricky proposition because people have to arrange their own airfares, accommodation, all of that kind of stuff.

Even from the early days, we were thinking about what else can we do to bring people together? As the online community has grown, opportunities arose to treat those comings together in a slightly different way. That’s one of the things we’ve really been focusing on here, is what do we get out of an annual conference? What does it cost us in terms of people, time, and money to put on an annual conference? What else can we do to further the aims and objectives of the organization?

I should also mention that an important factor in all this has been that right from the start, OZeWAI has been a WordPress house. The company I work for, TPGi, is a WordPress house. When I started working as a freelance web developer in the early 2000s, my immediate go-to tool was WordPress. It has been ever since. That’s one of the reasons that we wanted to attend this particular meetup, is that WordPress itself has been a very big factor in how we do what we do, and it will continue to do so. In that way, we really want to contribute to the presence of WordPress and the accessibility of WordPress in this country.

Now, I might hand over back over to Amanda to take you further into how we developed those concepts from a single conference into a national industry association.

>> AMANDA MACE: Thanks, Ricky. Ricky alluded to it. We always knew we had to do a little bit more. One of the things that makes us different from America is that in between Perth and Sydney, there’s a lot of desert. People generally don’t live too much in the centre of Australia. You could meet in the middle, but generally that’s not where the people are. We always knew we had to do a little bit more. As many people realized, COVID, with all of the awfulness that was COVID, some opportunities came along. COVID gave us a bit of an opportunity to put some of the research.

I’m actually going to get Bri to talk about some of the research that we put into what the change would be. What would it look like? What were our members at OZeWAI wanting and needing? We all really appreciated and needed. In fact, Bri likes to call it group therapy when we all get together. We all needed to get together. We wanted that element, but we knew that we had to change something, particularly during COVID, when we couldn’t physically be together. I know it was different all over the world, but here in Australia, we were particularly locked down.

Western Australia, where I live, shut itself and its doors to the rest of the country and the rest of the world. We were quite literally locked in our state, unable to travel. It protected us quite a bit, actually, as a state here in Western Australia, but it meant that we were separated from friends, from family, and of course, from those networking opportunities. Bri, I think it’d be appropriate for you to talk about some of the research that went into what kind of changes we needed and how we made those changes happen.

>> BRI NORTON: I also have a link of a summary of that research I’ll share in a moment from our AGM in 2022. I picked up the organizing of the annual conference in 2015 and brought it to Canberra from Melbourne. We ended up taking it to Sydney as part of a big conference at the National Broadcasting Network, ABC, and then COVID hit. We had to look at other ways to basically run the conference.

One of the things we found during COVID, or even just leading up to it, I’d run four or five of these conferences, we weren’t growing as a conference. We’d get a few edge cases every now and again, but it was really the same people coming together. I think when we first started, when OZeWAI first began, and maybe anyone working in accessibility for a long time would have thought, “Well, we should really be doing ourselves out of a job. Everything should be accessible. We shouldn’t need accessibility experts and specialists.”

We now know that’s not true. Technology changes, you’re going to need the accessibility specialists. One of the things we did in our research around that time was actually to find out what do Australian organizations or specialists, what do they need to continue to become professionalisation. We talked to IAAP initially to see whether we would be a part of the overarching global organization, but we still wanted to support our local community. We still have a good relationship with IAAP, and we use their certification approaches, but when it comes to the actual changes for OZeWAI, we did a bit of our own research.

Some of the research that we did, and I’ll just share the link to the page on our website, we did some interviews with our members and our committee members, a mix of long-term and new members, people who came to the conference regularly. We had members say that they wanted to see OZeWAI do more of the advocacy work and support members with disability in their work for the community. Many of our OZeWAI members are people with lived experience of disability. We are actually bringing accessibility for everything we do, our committee meetings, our events, everything from the start to finish, even our conference was always known as one of the most accessible.

We were having issues with our communication through the committee as well. I think lack of strategy and focus. We were just planning for that one annual conference, but we knew that we needed to do something different. Members were not aware of what OZeWAI was and what was our future plan. One of the things we did was we started to think about, “Well, this annual conference, how could we do this a little bit differently?” We researched professional memberships. We looked at the Fundraising Institute. It’s doing really amazingly well, and they actually self-regulate. We wanted to see what we could do to provide some consistency and some quality to the accessibility community in Australia.

We set up a new vision and mission. We also started to think about how would we change our approach to not having our own conference. One of the things Ricky and I discussed yesterday was, instead of going to a conference where everyone was talking about accessibility, yes, and we do need those, it’s why we have some special events that I’m going to show you in a minute, but one of the other things we do is that we partner with in-person conferences still. We take an accessibility lab like what’s on the screen here now, this one’s at Web Directions, and we will do demonstrations of assistive technology instead.

We go to conferences that need to be talking about accessibility. That’s the plan there. We try and partner with them. We’ve got a couple more coming up this year. The OZeWAI members, the way we try and do it is that they volunteer their time, and we try and get them tickets to that conference so they also learn and can network as well. The other aspect of that is that we also have now our online Ask the Professionals. We try and run them every month, similar to the WordPress meetup. We have been running them now for two years, and they have just gone gangbusters. They’re just so popular. The last one was on accessibility with WordPress with Amber and Ricky Blacker as well.

We have these online Ask professionals. We have a survey when you log in. They are recorded and put up on YouTube for free. We would also like to hear what topics. Even through the WordPress community, we want to hear what topics that you’d like to hear. We have an amazing collection of networking, with specialists across the world that we can bring in to some of these Ask the Professionals as well. That’s pretty much it.

We changed our approach to membership. We have a very small associate or advocacy membership cost. It’s $50 a year. If anyone joins right now in June, you get the whole of next year free. We do have what we call a Consultant Directory as well now. One of the things even leading up to us changing our membership approach was that I had, and I don’t know if the rest of the committee did, but I had a lot of people come up to me and say, “How do I find someone to help me with my project? How do I find someone?”

We needed to be impartial and careful about how we provided that advice because we wanted to make sure that the quality and consistency was there. We developed this consultancy directory. Anyone that joins as a member for OZeWAI does agree to a code of ethics. They join whatever consultancy tier suits them, but the Consultant Directory is now being listed on our Australian Human Rights Commission guidelines for finding an accessibility specialist in Australia, which we’re really, really proud of.

I’m going to now pass it over to Amanda, because our advocacy, we have some specific projects that we are working on. One of them is ICT procurement. We won’t go into that one too much at the moment, but we do have some resources that we can share with you. Also, just how are we going to build our understanding of accessibility and our quality in Australia? Over to you, Amanda.

>> AMANDA MACE: Thanks, Bri. This is a bit of a passion project of mine. I guess I’ll start with saying that, really, as part of what we were wanting to do is we wanted to really do some great advocacy work, not just around awareness of what is digital accessibility, but we know anecdotally that there aren’t enough experts here in Australia. The background to this really is that I went to a breakout session at the technical plenary AC meetings for W3C, which are an annual get-together of W3C membership, and I sat in on a session by David Fazio, who is the founder of Helix Opportunity and a colleague of mine in several W3C working groups.

He’s a great friend. He had been talking about some success he had had around developing an apprenticeship model for the Department of Labor in California, around digital accessibility developers. I was really fascinated by this because I thought, “This is the type of work that OZeWAI should be doing.” Maybe not around accessibility specialists in development, but really about just building up the industry itself. It’s probably not very surprising that when I sat in on this meeting, I went, “This is something that we need to think about from an OZeWAI perspective, and could we facilitate this?”

Once we made the connection between this purpose of OZeWAI outside of a conference now and the benefits, I guess, for the industry as a whole inside Australia, not just obviously the accessibility industry, but looking beyond it, digital teams, more organizations and companies are bringing in accessibility specialists. What we know anecdotally is that they’re bringing in people who have an interest in accessibility, but maybe not the real expertise. They’re learning on the run. Most people who get into accessibility, if you have a chat with them, you’ll find out they fell into it.

I am no different. I suspect that Ricky and Bri have very similar stories. We all just fall into it. We become experts over a long period of time with enormous amount of experience. This idea of bringing in an apprenticeship model for accessibility was really, really fascinating for us. Particularly for me, it is a bit of a passion project for me. This led us to talking globally with some people who had developed, some of them, internal projects around creating digital accessibility apprentice for their internal organizations.

Atos has this great program, which has a global presence. I think they have 100,000 employees. Their program was actually adopted by the UK government. It became a really good success. We looked at that. We spoke to some other people who were doing similar things, just finding ways to where doors were open, where the work would begin, because one of the challenges that we had is we want to do this, but how do we do this? How do we start? That became a real question. I’ll talk about where we ended up, our starting point outside of the initial research of what’s already out there. Ricky, do you want to talk a little bit about why we need accessibility apprenticeships?

>> RICKY ONSMAN: Sure. I think one of the things that gives this a bit of perspective is to understand what you might call the legislative framework that we’ve had to deal with in Australia. In some ways, Australia has been incredibly progressive in that we had the Disability Discrimination Act from 1992, which was only a couple of years after the Americans with Disabilities Act came into force. Significantly, one of the aspects of that is that it was a challenge-based system so that people could create complaints against particular providers on the basis of discrimination, on the basis of disability.

There was a very famous one at the Sydney Olympics in the year 2000 when Bruce Maguire lodged a complaint with the Human Rights Commission that, as a blind user, he was unable to purchase tickets to events to the Sydney Olympics. That was successful. The Sydney Olympic Organising Committee had to pay him a fine. Since then, nothing has happened. There has not been a single successful complaint in the Human Rights Commission on the basis of failing the Disability Discrimination Act.

One of the things that has influenced that, and this is the same with a lot of countries around the world, particularly the US, is that there are several levels of government, and they all approach things in a different way. You have a federal government, you have state governments, you have local governments, and you have statutory authorities that exercise their control.

Governments change over time. At one stage, we had a very progressive government that said all government services must be accessible to people with disabilities by the year 2014. That government lost office before that deadline arrived. The following government came in and said, “We’ll put that on the back burner.” Approaching it sheerly on a legislative basis doesn’t achieve a great deal. One of the things that occurred to us was to approach it more on an agency basis.

Most state governments in Australia now have one or other agency that focuses on a digital strategy. There is an inevitable awareness that a lot of people use digital services to access all kinds of things, medical, legal, financial services, and those things have to be accessible. The question then is, how do you actually implement that? We’ve been working with the various offices on digital strategy, but we wanted to find something that was more practical as well.

What we came up with was the concept of promoting accessibility apprenticeships, whereby accessibility is baked into a part of anybody’s job, in theory, but particularly working at things like government level, within the education system, within all kinds of systems where people have a traineeship of one sort or another. What we want to do is both make awareness of digital accessibility stronger in those traineeships, but also provide direct support to them, a mentoring arrangement, if necessary, providing resources to make that a reality.

That’s where our accessibility apprenticeships approach tried to come up with a more practical thing than just coming up with ideas, but actually finding ways to implement those ideas. I might hand over to Bri to continue that.

>> BRI NORTON: Thanks, Ricky. I’ve shared a few links in the chat to where we’ve come over the last couple of years. We have just gone through another election, so we are preparing another letter. Getting support for that letter for the digital accessibility apprenticeship, that’s the plan to go forward. Also, we’re working with an organization called FSO, the Future Skills Organisation.

They’re doing a lot of research into the digital capability gaps in Australia, whereas digital accessibility is seen as a large gap. A lot of that research will help support us in what happens, as well as the Human Rights Commission’s guidelines, that are saying that you need to meet those requirements when you’re procuring something, as well as building.

What we’re seeing is that people are going to universities, or even school. Starting in high school or primary school, they’re creating PowerPoints that are inaccessible. We need to get accessibility bedded in from the start in our schools in Australia. We also need to make sure that those that are actually building those products and services, especially at the university level, are actually taught about digital accessibility skills and the training that they need. An apprenticeship is one of those approaches, because then it could be people that are having work at the same time.

That’s the current state of the project. That’s just one of our projects with OZeWAI. I’ve realized that we’ve just gone into a bit of time, and we haven’t really opened up for any questions. Do we want to have some questions first, or should we get into some of the other resources that OZeWAI provide? Maybe some details about our Ask the Professionals coming up. Does anyone have any questions?

>> PAOLA GONZALEZ: I haven’t seen any questions in the Q&A box. If anyone would have any questions right now, that would be the perfect time to put them in. I think in the meantime, you guys can continue. We can have the Q&A portion at the end of the presentation if that’s okay with you.

>> BRI NORTON: Yes, all good. I’m just going to go through some of the slides, because Ricky and Amanda have gone through this. We did a survey and gap analysis of interviews of the accessibility workforce. We’ve received some feedback for that. That went to the Future Skills Organisation. This was the survey that we did at one of the conferences to try and get people to do it. That’s been shared. That’s a little bit more about OZeWAI.

We do have some amazing resources as well. We’ve been working on accessible ICT procurement. We have what’s called a product accessibility list. Please, if you want to ask about things that are accessible, I’m just going to put that link in the chat as well. If you’d like to be involved in some of our projects, please feel free to reach out to OZeWAI. We take membership from anywhere. We’re not shy. Our newsletter, obviously, is actually read globally and shared globally as well. That’s from over 20 years of running the conference. We’ve built up quite a network. We’re nearly coming up to 1,000 subscribers for our newsletter. Feel free to join that.

Is there anything else that you’d like to talk through, Amanda and Ricky, about OZeWAI?

>> AMANDA MACE: Two things really popped into my head. One is we still are gathering evidence for the apprenticeship to make the case for this apprenticeship. As Bri alluded to, we’ve been in contact with politicians, particularly federal. From a state perspective, we have a lot of engagement, particularly in Queensland right now and New South Wales. We do have people from a political point of view with some, I guess, some push to make this all happen, but we continue to gather evidence for the need, not just here in Australia, but globally.

If you know of some evidence where this has either been successful or there’s that real need, I think that the truth is, even in America, where there’s obviously a much bigger population, the need for expertise in accessibility is really important. One of the things that we want to avoid is people saying they’re accessibility experts without any formal training or understanding of accessibility or the experience that is really needed. Standards are complicated, and they’re meant to be. Technical specifications are meant to be complicated because they’re for technical people. Being able to break that down in a way that helps everyone do their job more accessibly is really important.

The other thing that I think is really important to point out is the PAL project that you really briefly touched on, Bri, because I think that’s a really important project that we’ve been working on. The PAL project itself is really a way of understanding that third-party software that you’re using to plug in or you’re using to do things as part of your everyday work, how accessible is it? Now, it’s not a full audit of a particular product, but what it does do is we’ve got a group of volunteers who are going in looking at, say, an Atlassian, let’s use Jira as an example, and saying, do they have an ACR? What are they doing around accessibility?

We know Atlassian actually is quite proactive in terms of a broader accessibility for the company itself, but how good is Jira from an accessibility point of view so you can make a better, more informed decision? This is part of our procurement work that Bri works really closely with. A, we’re always looking for volunteers. If you’re interested in having a look at some products and seeing how accessible they are and being able to help advise others, we’ve got a bit of a table that runs in our PAL to give people an indication of where that product might be in its accessibility journey.

I think that’s actually a really important thing. There isn’t a centralized place in general where you can just go, “Yes, that’s good.” You’re trusting the companies to tell you if that product’s accessible. I think this provides another pathway for us to keep OZeWAI members really informed and help them make better procurement decisions. As we all know, when we’re going to get new products in, one of the things that can be really challenging is understanding how accessible that product is before we bring it in.

Oftentimes, what we end up finding out is, if you’re lucky enough to be working with a TPGi or a GrackleDocs who do audits, you get that report back, suddenly you realize that that third-party product that you have been utilizing is actually terrible for accessibility and you’ve already committed to a five-year contract. Being able to have a bit of a more informed decision, particularly for your procurement team, is actually really important. I think it’s worth pointing that out.

I can see now, Bri, that you’ve added that link to the webinar chat. It’s worth checking that out. We need more volunteers. We need more products on there. We need to grow that list. I think it’s a really important part of the work that we’re doing. Ricky, do you mind if–

>> BRI NORTON: Amanda, if I could just.

>> AMANDA MACE: Yes, go ahead.

>> BRI NORTON: I was just going to mention, too, that I work for a company in Melbourne who is going through their systems separately. They have their WordPress site. They’re trying to get their WordPress site more accessible. It’s a slow journey because it’s a customized site. We’re doing the pieces, and they’ve got a small budget. Understand what that’s like for a lot of people here when you’re working with your clients.

You might be asked, “Oh, I want to use this tool. I want to use that tool.” You want to know a little bit more about how that software or that tool that your clients are asking to use is that accessible. In some ways, you’re not just doing your WordPress site. You might be that technology person that people come to about other tools that they’re using, or you need to integrate it in some way. That’s where the power can come in as well.

Also, I think just to add in that OZeWAI is here for those professionals or those that are asked to do accessibility, especially in small organizations that do have WordPress sites, or even medium or large. Some of the larger ones do. I think we’re here for those people that are on their own that need that support network and need to understand what training they need, how they can do mentoring. We’re looking at doing some mentoring through OZeWAI as well. It’s just something, trying to think about as part of this is the WordPress meetup community. Organizations like OZeWAI can help support you in your own roles as well.

Ricky, you must have seen that a few times as you were working on WordPress sites for clients, right?

>> RICKY ONSMAN: For sure. Yes, yes. One of the things that I think is important to note as well in the evolution of OZeWAI, apart from the various advocacy-focused projects that we’re running, is just the general concept of information sharing. When you think back to the concept of the annual conference, that was actually one of the most important functions of the conference that had brought people together in a room to be able to not only share learnings from presenters in presentations, but also just to network, see how you’re going, share information.

If we were going to do away with the notion of a single in-person face-to-face national conference, how were we going to reproduce those kind of functions? What we’ve done is a number of things. A few of them have been mentioned so far. Our newsletter is a very important one. That in itself has evolved over time. Initially, the OZeWAI newsletter was about what’s happening at OZeWAI. That was very important in itself, but it was very inward-looking. Since then, we’ve evolved it into a more outward-looking newsletter.

It’s a monthly email newsletter that tells you not only what’s happening within OZeWAI, projects we’ve got going, which is important, but also what else is happening in the industry, both nationally and internationally. What kind of events are there that you could be going to and proselytizing accessibility? What kind of jobs are available in the industry within Australia? What kind of social media is there to carry the messages? That’s become very popular, both just as a means of transmitting information, but also people have started sending us information for inclusion in the newsletter. We’ve become a crux point for the exchange of information.

In the same way, Australia, because of the way it’s got isolated cities a long way apart from each other, tend to have gatherings of people on a city basis. Meetups, they’re face to face, online, various different formats. We’re now looking at what if we had an online national meetup that brought people from all of those meetups together to continue that exchange of information. There’s probably no other agency in the country that would be willing or able to take on that kind of function, but we see it as something that might be something we could do to ensure that people, even from isolated communities, can take part in meetups that focus on digital accessibility.

The other aspect of that is, and I think Bri will touch on this more shortly, is the Ask the Professionals online sessions, where we bring together speakers on specific topics that, in much the same way as this kind of meetup, talk about specific things they want to share that they are expert in. Subject matter experts. The format that we have is to try to find three speakers, one from Europe, one from North America, and one from Australia. Finding the time zone balance of that is not always easy, but it does give you a terrific balance of the different environments that people are working in.

We don’t want it to be totally Australian. We want it to be Australian in an international context. Those two have become incredibly popular. The other aspect is then of us participating in things like conferences that focus on web technology, design, development, content authoring, and finding a way to have a presence in those, either as speakers or just in the way that some conferences have stalls and booths that allow people to share information about what they’re doing. We’re trying to take a proactive role of sharing our information in contexts outside OZeWAI.

That’s a very important function as well. That’s, frankly, why we’re participating in a WordPress accessibility meetup, because we see it as a way of sharing information on a topic that’s common to all of us. Over to you, Bri.

>> BRI NORTON: I guess, too, one of the things by partnering with other conferences and asking for our members to assist with networking, it’s a way for them to network. We can organize a local meetup as part of that conference. Amanda and I spoke a couple of years ago at a travel conference in Queensland, ran a workshop there, could do some networking, and we organized other OZeWAI members to meet as well. It becomes that smaller networking where people are rather than having to travel long distances to meet up with other people.

It’s worked quite well, I think, in the last couple of years. On our website, we share which conferences we’ve been to. We’re always looking to open up to more. We support even the online WordPress conference as well. Ricky, I think you’re heading to Melbourne for the UX Australia Web Directions Conference. We’ll be asking our members who would like to assist with some of the– if there’s a lab available for that, and then putting it out to them to see if anyone from that city can actually join. That’s been really great, and we’ve had some great ways to catch up with people by doing that.

>> AMANDA MACE: I want to touch on–

>> BRI NORTON: Amanda? I think so, yes.

>> AMANDA MACE: It’s really interesting. Because Australia is so big, and because these big capital cities are actually so far apart– I am the furthest. I live in Perth, Western Australia, which is the most isolated capital city in the world. It is a big city. It has all the big city amenities, but it is completely cut off. We have ocean on one side and desert on the other for several thousand kilometers. The next closest city to us, I suppose, would be Adelaide, but Adelaide’s still pretty small, smaller than Perth, actually. Literally, it’s on the other side of the country.

One of the things that’s been really successful here in Perth has been this in-person meetup scenario. For– Gosh. We are 15 years with the Perth accessibility meetup. I joined the accessibility meetup, I think, in 2013. I’ve been part of it for 12 years. Now, in the last 18 months, I’ve actually taken over leading the group itself. One of the things about that meetup, the Perth one in particular, as OZeWAI has, it’s gone through its evolution into what it is now, which is probably one of the most successful meetup groups in the country, to be honest, from an accessibility point of view.

It’s been ongoing. It has a one-day conference every year. It’s been really successful, but it’s still really isolating. It’s still mostly Perth people. Being able to share, one of the things Bri and I had a conversation with the committee was we’ve got lots of these little groups. Canberra’s got a group, Melbourne, Sydney. Brisbane’s sort of got a group. They’re trying. They had one. It’s come and gone. We thought, “Well, what if we connected all of these groups together, offered support?” Our first thing was to offer support to those meetups.

There were meetups like here in Perth who went, “Thanks, but we’re able to pay for our own Zoom. We’ve got it. We don’t really need financial support, but we’d love to have the power of OZeWAI behind us from a promotional point of view, get our message across, make sure everyone knows that we exist and is able to participate.” It certainly helps me when I’m arranging guest speakers, “Bri, know anyone who would like to chat?” Those sorts of things. Then we had the smaller groups or the ones who are meeting less frequently. We thought what we should do is connect all of these people together.

Some of the support that came through was really just the connection. That’s ultimately what we do as an organization, is connect people, whether we’re connecting through our consultancy list, where we’re connecting experts with people who need the experts, or we’re just connecting accessibility people with accessibility people. Sometimes we’re looking through at a mentorship program. That’s something that I think will really help when we’re looking to get people who are just coming into the industry to connect with people who’ve been in the industry for a long time.

It’s more than that. It’s the people who, in their everyday job, they don’t want to not be what they’re doing. They want to be a developer. They don’t want to be an expert, but they want to have enough knowledge. They want to be able to be advocates. They want to have the right words to bring back to their UX team, to their manager, to whoever it is that they need to get the budget to do the things they need to do, get the time.

Resources. We always think of resources as about money. It’s often about time, “How do I get more time so I can do this thing right?” Or “How do I get more people involved? How do I have the right words?” A lot of the smaller meetups, what they’re doing is providing some of that language. How do we get involved? What are the things we need to know? OZeWAI bringing everyone together means more information sharing.

You didn’t give yourself enough credit, Ricky, around the newsletter and some of the articles that are getting published within the OZeWAI website, because lots of that is Ricky’s work, actually, spreading more knowledge, and sharing more knowledge. Education is the key here. We talk about how this isn’t taught well enough in school. As a simple side story, the other day I was helping my son with his English homework. He’s in Year 8 or grade eight, as they call it in North America.

In grade eight, he’s in an advanced English class. They’re writing an article. He was doing it in Word. It’d gotten quite long, and he was scrolling up and down. I said, “Open your navigation pane, bud.” He’s like, “What’s that?” I show him how to open the navigation pane. Then I showed him how to use styles. We just added headings to his article. He was like, “That’s so cool, Mom. How did you know that?” I’m like, “Well, I just taught you something about accessibility, actually.”

I sat there and had a 10-minute conversation with my son about, A, yes, the navigation pane was really helpful for him, but now navigating and understanding the context of his article was going to be really helpful for anyone who wanted to read that particular article. We had a whole conversation. He’s in Year 8. Imagine if all the Year 8s learned a little bit about how to use Word properly, how much better our documentation is going to be. Those are the types of things that we really want to promote. Within W3C, it’s called education and outreach. I think that’s really what OZeWAI is trying to do: education and outreach.

>> BRI NORTON: Yes, exactly. You want to add to that, Ricky?

>> RICKY ONSMAN: One of the things that we haven’t really talked about but that loom heavily over all of us with these kind of operations is finance. OZeWAI is entirely volunteer organization. None of us are paid. We all have day jobs. We all choose to commit some of our time to trying to achieve the aims and objectives of the organization. Some of that is expensive. It is significant that one of the factors that we took into account about considering the annual conference is that annual conferences are expensive to run and they’re expensive for people to attend.

Again, we looked at what kind of methodologies could we use to reach the same objectives as an annual conference without the cost of an annual conference. Our online activities are good examples of that. Of course, they’re not free either. Like all organizations like this, we’re constantly looking at what are funding opportunities. How much do we charge for membership? How much do we rely on the income from members for things? Do we charge for events?

We had a brief period where Ask the Professionals was getting very successful, so we thought, “Why don’t we just impose a small charge and make it free for members?” The attendance fell off alarmingly at the next two sessions, so we backtracked on that and went, “No, we can’t charge for that because we just won’t get people attending.” That’s a constant juggling act for us.

It’s significant that the more our reputation grows and we get involved with particularly government agencies looking for informed advice on how to achieve their ends that they consider funding us for certain projects. That is a real path for us of getting funding for specific projects with specific aims that in turn help to fund our more general activities. Inevitably, it’s something that concerns us on a monthly, on a weekly basis, of how do we make sure that OZeWAI doesn’t fall over through a lack of finance. If anybody has any brilliant ideas on philanthropical contributions, we’d love to hear it.

>> BRI NORTON: Yes, we’d love to, definitely. I think on that too, there’s an interest in as accessibility teams are growing in Australia and their interest, they are looking for those forums of where they’re going to get assistance, support, and mentoring. We already have one government department who wants to work with us. Rather than us just saying, “Well, join with your community practice of 100 people,” we’re going to work with them to decide what that looks like so they get what they need in their approach of building up the accessibility expertise and education in a very large state organization.

There’s still a lot of work for us to do. Fortunately, we have a wonderful, strong committee at the moment. We are coming up to renewals, which is why we’re doing a lot of this talk about OZeWAI. We’d love people to join and share that we have these events. Also, just share if you know someone that we should be hearing about, any topics that we should be talking about, adding to our calendar of events. We’d love to hear that as well.

I think for the moment, too, if you’ve got something that– What’s something that you look for? I don’t know if you want to put it in the chat or if you’d like to share, but if you’ve got something that you’d like to share about what would you look for in a professional organization, what do you need from organizations like OZeWAI or IAAP or from your local meetups? Something even I’m sure the WordPress Accessibility Meetup would learn from as well. Feel free to put some ideas in the chat as well, because that always helps us.

Amanda, did you have anything else you wanted to add? I know that we’re coming up to the hour in. Do we take a break, Paola, or are we just going to continue on?

>> PAOLA GONZALEZ: [Inaudible 00:53:08]

>> BRI NORTON: You’re on mute.

>> PAOLA GONZALEZ: I am on mute. Okay, there we go. I was going to say we just continue on. I do see that we have a few questions in the chat, in the Q&A box. I just wanted to address those.

>> BRI NORTON: Yes. Great.

>> PAOLA GONZALEZ: Simon asks, “I live in Massachusetts, and my state connects blind and visually impaired students, professionals with organizations for summer internships. The state pays the interns for their work. My company, an accessibility agency, has participated in this program for the past couple of years, and it’s been a great way to provide an official accessibility apprenticeship while getting help with client work. Are you aware of other national, state, or local government programs like this?

>> AMANDA MACE: Wow.

>> BRI NORTON: Amanda, do you know of any of those?

>> AMANDA MACE: Not here in Australia that I know of.

>> BRI NORTON: No.

>> AMANDA MACE: I guess, as part of the apprenticeship that we’ve been researching, we did have the talk about whether we do an internship or an apprenticeship. Interestingly, here, is that the government is paying for the internship work, but in general, internships aren’t paid positions. That’s why we went down the apprenticeship model rather than the internship model. We also really wanted the education piece. We wanted to ensure that the education of that person was really well-rounded and not just work experience. We want that combination of formal, “This is what you need to know,” that technical knowledge, with the practical application of being inside work experience.

No, I haven’t heard of that. It is absolutely something that I think we could probably approach a Vision Australia or a Visibility about. Bri, that’s something that we should maybe add to our meeting.

>> BRI NORTON: Definitely.

>> AMANDA MACE: That’s a great idea.

>> BRI NORTON: Yes. I have tried to do that because I run the Canberra meetup [laughs] in Canberra. One thing I’ve been trying to do is to connect with the Canberra Blind Society here so that we can run some events. Maybe there are some new members of the Blind Society who would like to learn more about digital accessibility, because there is this thinking that people who use assistive technology are all going to be great testers of accessibility. As we know, that’s not necessarily true. There’s different levels of understanding of people using their own tech.

Yes, they can be involved in usability testing, obviously, with someone facilitating a researcher or a UX person facilitating, “Oh, can you test my website for me using your assistive tech?” That doesn’t necessarily make them all digital accessibility and WCAG experts. There’s a little bit of what’s that crossover knowledge of someone who is interested in wanting to become a digital accessibility specialist as well.

I think that’s a great idea. We should be doing more of that, but I think there’s also an aspect of do we do it as part of a usability approach or is it more people that want to learn more about digital accessibility. Definitely looking into it. That’s a great question.

>> RICKY ONSMAN: Within my experience as well, I’ve been approached several times by local councils to get involved with their accessibility work. That’s involved sponsoring people to get involved with increasing accessibility in the community. Largely, that’s focused on physical accessibility. I guess that’s understandable from a council’s point of view. They’re looking at everything from road works to building access, all of that kind of stuff. When I address the concept of digital accessibility, it takes them by surprise. It’s something that they have barely considered, even though people pay their council rates online. If those online facilities are not accessible, then people have a great deal of trouble with it.

At an individual level, I feel like there’s progress to be made there, but there’s a breakthrough that needs to happen to think more fully about digital accessibility and what it means to the local community that has yet to really happen. Certainly, OZeWAI is the kind of agency that can provide that kind of advice. It feels to me like there’s a long way to go on that front.

>> BRI NORTON: Yes. I’ve just put a link in the chat to Ability Works. Feel free to do the same for GrackleDocs, too, Amanda. We actually do a lot of the physical usability testing as well as the digital usability testing. There’s in-house people with lived experience that are part of those projects. There’s also an online register of people that can get involved in projects, especially digital usability. We like to do a bit of both. When we do an accessibility audit, we bring in that we’re going to do some usability testing with screen reader users as part of that approach. [crosstalk] You’ll probably do the same, Amanda, yes? Oh, sorry, Ricky. Yes, go on.

>> RICKY ONSMAN: I was just going to mention that there’s an annual project that we’ve been involved with for a few years now called Get Online Week, which is focused on people with disabilities, but also I guess a stronger focus on older Australians and getting them online, which necessarily means making things accessible to them. The presentations that we’ve given there have focused on things like using your phone to do online shopping, and the reaction to it has been great. But, again, it feels like a real breakthrough of the community that’s being aimed at not having considered using their phone to do online shopping either because they weren’t aware that it was a possibility at all or because when they started it, it just seemed so difficult to manage.

If we have a blind presenter walking through saying, “This is how I choose a film from Netflix. This is how I do my shopping at Kohl’s,” it changes the way they look at stuff. There’s a kind of a combination of physical access and digital access that works together in those ways. That’s something we’d like to do a lot more of as well.

>> PAOLA GONZALEZ: Thank you for those resources there. Going on to our next question. Samuel says, “One comment I have encountered and spoken with my UX deaf peers in USA government works is that we often want to build out more maturity in accessibility work, and HCD maturity too, but are already limited on funds and time. Expert work is often outsourced to contractors that come and go. Do you have any advice on how we can better make a case for doing more of this work in-house?

>> AMANDA MACE: Absolutely. I actually just ran a workshop in February across Australia and into New Zealand as well, around essentially making a strategic case for resources, both time and money, and what that really looks like. The first thing you have to do is take temperature of the room. What do you have now? What needs working? You can’t prioritize things until you know what you have. In accessibility, the first thing lots of people do is do an audit, but they do an audit before they’ve done an audit of their digital footprint. First, you have to know a bit more, and you have to get the right people involved.

It’s really important that this doesn’t always get stuck with the same people. There’s levels in which to get accessibility really moving forward. You’re going to have the people who are managing everything. Those people are going to be from different areas. You’re going to have the ones who are just doing the work individually. You can’t get any of that done without upper management giving the tick. You actually need to plan that out a bit. That’s making a business case.

Making a business case involves understanding the footprint in which you have, where doing a bit of a racy understanding where everyone is, what they’re responsible for, what they need to be informed about, so that you understand who you’re going to next. You need to be able to, “If I can’t get this vendor to come along, how can I push that up so there’s pressure coming from the right person?” Those things are actually really important. You actually have to build a bit of a business case sometimes.

Now, that depends. Depending on how you’re approaching this. If it’s for a specific project or it’s an organizational thing. An organizational thing, I’d actually recommend, and this is something that lots of organizations do. Certainly, I suspect, Ricky, TPGi does it. GrackleDocs does it. I’m not sure about Ability Works. Bring someone in who isn’t in the weeds to take a better look from a strategic point of view and start building out that plan. Strategically, be able to look overall at your organization and go, “Here’s your digital footprint. Here’s how.” That should be done. I imagine any organization worth their salt should be done hand in hand because you know your organization best, and you need to be able to talk to those people.

It’s very true that when you have– As someone who’s been in consultancy with accessibility for 13 odd years now, sometimes I go in and I say the exact same thing that person who’s been advocating for accessibility has been saying for five years. I’m saying the exact same thing. I may even be using the exact same words. Sometimes, when it comes from someone outside, suddenly someone starts listening. The people who need to listen are listening. I’m not saying that’s fair. It’s not fair at all. Sometimes it helps to bring someone in.

It also helps when you bring someone in who isn’t part of the everyday workplace business as usual. Having someone to be able to look at a more overall approach to come in and build a bit of a strategic plan around accessibility. One of the challenges we have in accessibility is we put out a lot of spot fires. As someone who has worked as a consultant for a long time doing this, when I get brought in or my team gets brought in for little projects, it’s just spot fires. You can’t deal with the bigger issue, which is probably more of a systemic problem about how we’re doing procurement or how we’re building out things. There’s a bigger look to accessibility.

I actually do recommend. This is where you should bring outsource, that sort of thing. Bring in an expert who can build out a strategic plan that looks at everything as a whole and gets upper management. The people who sign off on bringing in full-time employees, if you need some FTEs to help make that happen, you need sign off from upper management. You need to make sure they’re speaking the right language around the board table. That’s really important.

In middle management, you can all agree with your colleagues around what you need to do or how you need to do it, but if you’re not allotted the time, or the resources, or the employees to do it, or the funds to do it, then you’re not going to get very far. It’s really important that you have the right person who’s able to sit around the board table to say, “Here’s the real ROI. Here’s the real risk.” Especially in America. “Here’s the risk that you’re at.”

Here in Australia, as Ricky already pointed out, the likelihood of getting sued is pretty low here. I don’t recommend ever going in with a stick, but the truth is, is that this is part of a risk assessment. Bring someone in who can talk to the right people in the right language. I wish everyone did accessibility because it’s the right thing to do. To be fair, I haven’t met anyone. Not a CEO has been malicious. They either haven’t known any better. They haven’t realized. They haven’t been empowered to understand the impact. Sometimes, risk assessment is your best way in. Understanding who the right person is to bring into your organization to make those conversations happen is actually significantly important.

>> RICKY ONSMAN: I’d agree with that, 100%.

>> BRI NORTON: [crosstalk]

>> RICKY ONSMAN: TPGi very much works on that basis as well. We embed our engineers with our clients. Their aim is to achieve the business aims of our clients in an accessible way. No one goes in with, “We are the enforcers. You now have to do what we say.” It’s about, “Practically, how can we achieve our business aims in an accessible way?” The business directory that OZeWAI has built is part of that as well, because how do you find people who can be brought into an organization in order to provide that expert advice?

In Australia, there isn’t a central repository of that information outside of OZeWAI. That’s part of why we’re trying to build a business directory, that when people who are looking for expertise in digital accessibility can come to our website, look through who does what in what areas, and find people to connect to, to bring into their organization.

>> BRI NORTON: I also want to add, just from the other point of view, too, that you might feel like you’re alone, find your allies in your organization. Find out what is something that would align to that risk assessment. Whether you have some charter or a policy that says that you will be inclus– Organizations tend to have HR policies about how people are treated. There might be an employee reference group, a disability reference group. Align yourself with them and talk to them, because not only are they the supporters that want to be working in an inclusive workplace and want everything to be accessible, they’ll be your backup. They’ll be your allies as well. Start doing things like brown bag lunches with them.

With outside organizations, invite them to come in and do a demonstration with your leaders or with your managers to say, “Look, they’re using our website and they’re getting stuck here,” or, “They can’t apply on the recruitment because the recruitment form is not accessible.” Showing some story, or video, or something as part of your approach, obviously, carefully doing that as part of your research, but evidence-based is the way to go.

Also, just building up your connection of allies within your organization. Meet regularly, talk about how you can get that strategy in, and get those people in to come and give you that higher-level roadmap of work. Find out who can support you and what they do in their work that becomes that analysis against maybe that risk or that need that has to change in a budget finance situation.

If it’s that you sell a product– I mean, government’s different. You have to be meeting all your citizens’ needs. That in itself is you’re meeting that requirement. If you’re selling a product of some kind, don’t you want to sell it to more people? Making things more accessible will mean that you’ll be able to sell it to more people. It’s those business cases. The W3C not only has the business case approach as well, but it also has the W3C maturity model. You can run that yourself in your own organization. It starts to build the relationships with the other areas of your business that may need to be involved, like Amanda’s shared already. Do what you can to find who are your backup in your organization to support you.

>> PAOLA GONZALEZ: Thank you for that plan of action and those resources. That was a great answer overall with all the little nuggets here and there. I just want to give you guys the floor for your final thoughts and to let everyone know where they can find you. I guess we can start with you, Bri.

>> BRI NORTON: Perfect. OZeWAI. Ozewai.org. Basically, subscribe to the newsletter. That’s free. Like I said, we’re getting closer to that thousand number. Maybe we’ll have a bit of a prize or something for someone who is our 1,000th subscriber. We’re also coming up to a key number in our membership. We’re hoping to build on that over the next year in our membership as well. Share anything on socials. Connect with us. Reach out to us.

I know between Ricky, Amanda, and I, we are very prevalent on LinkedIn. A little bit more on Bluesky these days, trying to get involved in that. Also, we answer questions as people ask them, as well and direct people. I get so many questions about accessibility. It’s through my networking, and the wonderful people that I know, and the members of OZeWAI, and the committee at OZeWAI that I can share, “Oh, you need to go talk to that person,” or “Go talk to that person.” That helps in government as well.

Keeping up the network, let’s not do this alone, is the main thing. Support each other. Get involved in these kinds of meetups. Volunteer your time. Keep involved with anything accessibility, and hope to see you at some of our events. Over to you, Amanda.

>> AMANDA MACE: Thanks, Bri. My final thoughts are all around the education and outreach piece. It’s really important that we continue to talk about accessibility and be okay with not knowing the answer. One of the traps that we get into as people who are advocating for accessibility is to feel the pressure to know everything about everything in accessibility, and that’s just not true.

The best part, ask the professionals, the panel, the monthly webinar that we do at OZeWAI. That came about because professional development for experts is actually– it’s not really there, is it? You can go to conferences. Sometimes I go to conferences and you realize, like– Especially conferences that aren’t about accessibility. I’m not learning anything about accessibility at this conference. It’s professional development, but in another way.

Ask the professionals. It’s professional development for people who already know how to add alt text. It goes beyond that. I think that that’s really important that we continue to put our hand up to say we don’t know everything. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the industry. It continues to grow as technology grows, as people grow, as our knowledge grows. We speak a lot more about neurodiversity, for example, than we did when I first entered the industry 13 years ago.

As we continue to learn and grow, we need to continue to learn and grow as experts. OZeWAI is one of those places where I see that growth, and that connection, that networking coming together and sharing those learnings. It’s what I really value about it. That and a glass of wine with Bri at least a couple of times a year are the two things I value most. No, I get to work with really great people.

While we are obviously very Australian-focused, both Ricky and I work for international companies. Mine’s Canadian-based. His is American-based. We’ve got a real international feel. My accent obviously sounds quite international. I’m Canadian by birth. Coincidence, I work for a Canadian company. I have been in Australia for a really long time now. These are the types of things that we need to do. It is a global movement, accessibility. It’s one that will continue to evolve. OZeWAI is looking to be at the very head of that involvement. Ricky?

>> RICKY ONSMAN: My final thought is really an extension of that. We’ve taken time to build ourselves up as a national organization. It’s really been trying to focus on things that affect the industry in this country. You can’t be isolationist about that. You have to look at yourself in a global perspective. Part of our immediate aims in the next couple of years is to extend our connections with similar organizations elsewhere in the world.

Mind you, I have to say there aren’t many that really focus on that. There are international organizations like IAAP, but we’d really like to connect with other national-focused organizations to build those international connections because it is a global perspective, and we do have global aims. We really want to connect with other organizations that are doing the same kind of thing, that can learn from us, but that can also teach us about how we can achieve the aims that we have. I’d also like to give a shout-out to GoDaddy for their sponsorship of the captions for this. It’s absolutely fantastic. Go and shout them out on social media.

>> PAOLA GONZALEZ: Thank you so much.

>> BRI NORTON: Thanks, Paola, as well.

>> PAOLA GONZALEZ: Yes, thank you so much, Bri, Amanda, Ricky. Thank you so much for all the knowledge that you guys gave us today. We’ll see everyone at our next meetup. Have a great morning or a great night.

>> BRI NORTON: Connect with us on LinkedIn.

>> RICKY ONSMAN: Thanks, everyone. Bye.

>> BRI NORTON: Maybe some of your questions we can answer there as well. Thank you, everyone.

>> PAOLA GONZALEZ: Thank you.

>> BRI NORTON: Great. Excellent.

>> [01:15:37] [END OF AUDIO]